Product Data Enrichment: Essential Tips and Tools

We live in a world of 30.7 million online stores—so it's no surprise that 73% of consumers feel overwhelmed while shopping. Three in four people feel bombarded by the noise of product pages, and another 72% can't tell from the content if a product actually delivers on its promises.

Ultimately, 74% of people walk away from purchases because they don't have the right info to make informed decisions. That could be thousands of dollars in lost revenue for your business: all because your products didn’t offer the right information.

The good news is that this is something you can fix. Product data enrichment is the easiest way to give customers truly useful information. It's also simple and easy to get started today (provided you follow the right tutorial, of course).

This guide explains how to boost online sales by enriching your ecommerce product data. It also lists some common pitfalls to expect so you can skillfully avoid any obstacles in your way.

Looking for something specific? Use this table of contents to jump to the right section.

A deep dive into ecommerce product data enrichment

Ecommerce product data enrichment means taking raw product data and adding extra layers of information to make them more accurate, appealing, and useful for customers. You can think of it like staging your home—it makes the place look more appealing and true to life (plus help it stand out from the crowd so it eventually sells).

Let's look at this hum-drum product description for a holiday wreath:

"Holiday wreath, 18-inch diameter, spray foam, plastic pinecones, wire hanger, rated for outdoor use."

Sure, it gets the message across, but it certainly doesn't capture the imagination. And considering the sheer number of holiday wreaths for sale, it doesn't offer anything that will stick in the customer's mind (before getting lost in a sea of search results, anyway).

Now, let's look at this same data after it's been enriched:

"Festive holiday wreath to complement any front door or porch. Enjoy the sights of the seasons and feel the holiday cheer with decorative 'snow,' winterized pinecones, and fluffy evergreen branches."

See how much more helpful this is?

Remember: ecommerce customers can't experience your products in person, but you can enrich your product description to help them make informed purchasing decisions.

Types of product data to enrich

Enriching product data can seem overwhelming at first glance. But take a deep breath: it gets a lot easier once you start breaking your product data down into types.

On that note, here are the three types of product data enrichment you should know:

Technical data enrichment

Technical data usually includes product specifications and attributes. This could include weight, dimensions, product identifiers (like SKUs), materials, and performance statistics like battery life.

Enriching technical data may require you to:

• Standardize measurements
• Update compliance info
• Add performance metrics
• Improve compatibility filters (like ‘USB-C compatible’)

Marketing data enrichment

From descriptions and images to features and benefits, marketing data covers the descriptions, keywords, and visuals of your product.

The enrichment process for marketing data may include:

• Updating product descriptions to make them more engaging
• Adding more social proof, including reviews and awards
• Uploading high-quality images, banners, and videos in your product catalog
• Auditing or improving existing keyword data

Logistical data enrichment

Anything to do with inventory details, shipping info, and storage requirements can be considered logistical data. For this reason, enrichment is mostly focused on operational aspects like inventory, shipping, and stock levels.

Enriching your logistical data may require:

• Updating availability info
• Adding warehouse stock levels
• Disclosing in-store availability
• Describing average shipping times

Isn't that the same as content enrichment or data cleansing?

Contrary to popular belief, product data enrichment isn't the same as content enrichment or data cleansing.
Let's hash it out:

Product data cleansing is all about fixing problems. This could be adding missing details, removing repetitive info, or cleaning up incomplete data sets. However, product data enrichment is about improving your data, not necessarily ‘fixing’ it.

Product content enrichment is all about enriching the marketing content directly related to your products. This means adding SEO keywords to titles and descriptions, as well as adding rich media like pictures and videos. Product data enrichment goes beyond just marketing content—it also enhances product tags, technical specifications, product attributes, and more. While content enrichment focuses mostly on marketing information, data enrichment focuses on improving all possible data.

TL;DR? These aren't interchangeable terms. However, you'll still need all three as part of your quality product data strategy.

Okay, but does product data enrichment really matter?

You bet it does—and in more ways than one. Especially if you want to maximize your sales.

For one thing, data enrichment keeps customers from getting overwhelmed. Considering three in four people abandon carts when they’re overwhelmed, giving real value can help customers seal the deal.

Enriched product data can also reduce product returns. Around 40% of people have returned an online purchase because its product content wasn't detailed or accurate.

The cherry on top? Enriched data can also help to boost customer trust and loyalty. A whopping 87% of people won’t do business with a retailer displaying inaccurate product data, which could cost thousands in unrealized revenue (and bad online reviews).

As you can see, enriched product data empowers potential customers to make confident, careful, and informed purchase decisions.

No need to take our word for it, though.

Here's what the experts have to say:

"Data enrichment isn’t a luxury; it’s the foundation of any successful marketing strategy. Whether you’re a small team or a global powerhouse, the quality of your data will make or break your efforts."
Terry Mitchell, Marketing Data Analyst @ HP

"We’ve been trained over the years to think of data enrichment as an “add-on” feature. But enrichment isn't a feature – this data is necessary and foundational to how the entire system thinks."
Christopher O'Donnell, Founder & CEO @ Day.ai

The 3 biggest benefits of product data enrichment

So now you know what (and why) product data enrichment matters. The real question is, what do you get in exchange?

We've already touched on a few benefits above, but let's look closer at the power of data enrichment:

Outstanding marketplace performance

The more information you provide about your products, the more customers feel confident about making a purchase decision. Studies show that product info has a direct impact on conversion rates, as a whopping 87% of online shoppers base their purchasing habits on product descriptions.

So what does this mean for ecommerce brands? Enriching your product data directly correlates to business growth. The more effort you put into product data enrichment, the more results you'll see for your bottom line.
You'll also see more results on search engines, as we’ll explain below.

Ease of discoverability

In the age of ecommerce, success is all about discoverability. You don't need deep pockets to pay for costly ads or TV campaigns—you just have to rank higher for key search terms and keywords.

Here are some ways enriched data makes discoverability easier:

• You can start ranking higher for popular search terms. With search engine optimization (SEO) and product listing optimization (PLO), your product pages will rank higher depending on your customers’ searches. Just keep in mind you need to focus on three fronts: Google's search engine, online marketplace search engines, and your own website’s product detail pages.
• You can also boost product discovery by optimizing social media platforms. With descriptive product listings, quality media, a list of key features and benefits, you can tap into a multi-billion dollar market of (essentially) free advertising.

Remember: 70% of all ecommerce sales come from the first page of search engine results. Enriched product data could make all the difference between ranking on page one and ranking on page three.

Happy and satisfied customers

It gets much harder to offer a quality customer experience when key product data is missing or inaccurate. If customers have a bad experience, it won't take long for their friends to find out—the average person shares negative brand experiences with 16 people. Considering that losing 53% of customers stop or lower their spending after poor interactions, it’s worth nipping this problem in the bud.

The good news is that companies focused on customer experience make 4% to 8% more than their peers. Considering 49% of customers who have positive experiences share user-generated content (aka positive reviews), enriching your product data could have an enormous impact on brand perception and profitability.

The 3 biggest challenges of data enrichment

It's not all fun and games in the world of data enrichment. Depending on your setup, it could get really complicated really fast.

Here are some pitfalls to keep in mind:

Managing multiple data sources

Here's something you should know about product data enrichment: it's both an art and a science. Because it's not necessarily about adding more product data, but deciding what info to share (and what not to share) from a sea of information.

Of course, it gets much harder to decide where to put what when you're buried knee-deep in supplier spreadsheets and vendor/retailer docs.

You need an easier way of consolidating information into a single source of truth. This isn't always easy if you're handling things manually, but thankfully, there are plenty of tools to help you make short work of this.

Curious to learn more? Watch our video demonstrating tools for managing supplier spreadsheets:

Manual data entry (aka human error)

It doesn't matter how accurate or detail-oriented you are—human error can and will interrupt your data enrichment workflow. Manually entering data into spreadsheets has an error rate of at least 5%. This number only rises the more complex your data becomes.

So what's the best way to avoid human error? By letting automations push data from one place to the next, which reduces human interaction (and therefore human error). Connecting your sales channels to a product information management (PIM) system is a great way to do this with automated product feeds.

Channel-specific requirements

Plan on selling through multiple channels? You need to be mindful of their specific requirements.

For example, maybe you can enrich your product details with a video on one platform, but on another, you can't upload dynamic media at all.

Not sure how to optimize each channel’s product details? Check out our ebook on multichannel commerce.

What it takes to capture, enrich, and implement great product data

Now that you know the key benefits of product data enrichment, let's look closer at the steps involved:

Validate and standardize your data

Break out the mop and bucket because it's time to get your organized! This is important for two reasons: making sure your data is accurate and making sure it's uniform and easy to work with.

There are a few ways to validate and standardize product data:

• Tap into AI or other tools using machine learning. These can help you automate data formatting and spot inconsistencies early.
• Keep detailed documentation. This ensures everyone on your team knows how to spot inconsistent or unformatted product data.
• Audit your product data. Depending on your marketing and product listings, this could be once per year or once per quarter.

Enrich your product data

This is where the rubber finally meets the road! Now it’s time to put theory into practice.

Of course, your actual data enrichment approach will completely depend on your business.

For example, you may want to:

• Write enriched product content (aka better product descriptions). Look for ways to include helpful details and make them more appealing to customers. If you don’t want to do this on your own, you can use AI tools to help you automate part of the process.
• Update technical specs with relevant information. If you can streamline vendor documents into a centralized location, you can standardize what data goes where and push details to the right place..
• Spruce up your page with videos, pictures, and even 3D images. Remember: 82% of consumers have been convinced to buy products by watching a video.
• Add user-generated content such as customer reviews and ratings. Considering 92% of consumers hesitate to buy products without reviews, it’s a good idea to optimize your presence by adding as many (positive!) videos, pictures, and text reviews as possible.

You should think through your options before jumping into the weeds.

Measuring success

A congratulation is in order—your data is finally enriched! But that doesn't mean your journey is over.

You still need to keep an eye on how your data enrichment is performing so you can update or pivot if something doesn't work out.

To do this, you need to consider your key performance indicators (or KPIs). How are you planning on measuring success?

Most ecommerce brands use a few different tools:

• Product page rankings: You can use tools like Google Search Console,  Ahrefs, or SEMrush to keep an eye on your product pages. Depending on your business, you can also use performance reporting tools provided by your distribution partners, sales channels, or retail partners.
• Return on investment (ROI): You can calculate this by dividing your net return by the cost of your investment. Be sure to keep careful tabs on expenses and income!
• Success benchmarks: Benchmarks are less about profit and more about specific business goals (like enriching 30 product listings per week, for example).

Rinse and repeat (aka updates and maintenance)

And just like that, you've completed the entire product data enrichment process. All that's left is to keep the flywheel turning, which requires updates, maintenance, and monitoring.

But remember: there’s still plenty of room to optimize your enrichment process.

This means:

• Cutting back on repetitive tasks. By streamlining your product data in a centralized database, you can easily send your updated data to multiple sales channels at once.
• Performing bulk edits. With the right software, you won’t need to enrich each product page one by one (or create duplicate work if the same products appear in multiple sales channels).
• Writing down your optimization process. That way, everyone on your team knows the protocol for fixing inaccurate data. This can also go through an approval process so they don’t make updates or edits without permission.

Of course, attempting to manage all this on your own could be overwhelming. You'll likely need tools and software to make this easier.

The 3 biggest secrets of great product data enrichment

Product data enrichment is easy to learn but fairly difficult to master.

Ready to see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

Buckle up: here's how to tackle that learning curve:

Data accuracy and completeness requirements

You need to create rules for data accuracy and completeness so that misinformation doesn’t slip through the cracks. This is where good product data management software comes into play: you can easily set up checks and balances that keep an eye out for missing information.

Software like PIM can also take extra work off your team's plate. For example, completeness attribute tracking lets you monitor product 'readiness' before going live. That way, you can standardize enrichment for each of your products and quickly review entries that need extra TLC.

Format consistency rules

Maybe you've listed the same info in different ways, or maybe you've duplicated data that makes your listing confusing to customers. Either way, setting format consistency rules for your team to follow can go a long way toward keeping product content clean.

To manage data inconsistencies, you could always:

• Write out a list of expectations in a shared Google doc
• Create rules for your website(s) and sales channels
• If you have one, use your PIM system to standardize formats for all your products

Image quality standards

Which do you think will convert more often: a high-quality 4K video, or a fuzzy thumbnail of your product? If you guessed the first option, you'd be right. Studies show 60% of consumers believe that high-quality photos are the most important part of online sales.

In product data enrichment, enriching for ‘high quality’ media means setting standards for quality, size, and branding. For example, if your brand identity follows a specific color palate, you’ll need to make sure every image follows the theme.

You should also keep an eye out for size or pixel discrepancies. You could task your team to manually review each image, or you could use AI tools to identify discrepancies automatically.

This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to dive deeper, here are some other ways to optimize your digital shelf.

Expert advice for product data enrichment

We surveyed the experts on how to survive the product data enrichment process. Thankfully, their responses were (mostly) painless.

Here are their suggestions for starting on the right foot:

Update data validation methods, quality control processes, and procedures regularly.

"It’s essential to involve stakeholders early and often, use automated tools, regularly review and update the data validation process, and determine the most suitable method based on your data’s complexity and size. Organizations can avoid potential pitfalls and make better-informed decisions based on reliable data. So, why validate data? Because you can’t afford not to."
Mona Rakibe, Co-Founder and CEO @ Telmai

Make it easy to collaborate: whether you're synchronizing channels or laboring alongside your team.

"Collaboration helps organizations streamline workflows by eliminating the need to enter data manually. Data collaboration tools and technology enable the automation of operations, saving time spent on manual data entry while boosting data accuracy and dependability."
Tal Sofer, Product Manager @ Treeverse

Focus on usefulness and context for the consumer.

"A great product manager knows that while data can provide direction, context and intuition complete the picture."
Madan Arora, Principal Product Manager @ Walmart

The tools you need to manage product data enrichment

Enriching one or two products? Probably something you can handle manually.

Enriching hundreds (or thousands) of SKUs? You'll need something better than Microsoft Excel.

Remember: your tech stack is everything in successful product data enrichment. You just need to figure out what makes the most sense for you.

Most business owners wind up using one (or all) of these:

• Artificial intelligence (AI). You can use AI as both a data enrichment and a data validation system. For example, you could purchase AI platforms that automatically flag problems or add more product details based on your documentation. One popular platform is Describely's AI, which can generate product descriptions and metadata in seconds.
• PIM software. In addition to the PIM features mentioned before, systems like Plytix PIM can also help consolidate product listings and highlight entries with missing product data. For example, you can use our completeness attribute to find products needing more descriptions, images, or meta-optimization. That way, you can experiment with rich content, product titles, and descriptions to boost your rankings and give your customers better experiences.

Enriching your data, one baby step at a time

It's admittedly overwhelming to look at everything involved with product data enrichment. If you're new to ecommerce, you're probably anxious, stressed, and worried you might ‘mess things up.’

But the good news is data enrichment gets much easier with practice. Plus, this guide has provided all the information you need to get started—all you have to do now is try.

Looking for the easiest way to get started? A PIM system like Plytix can help.

Learn more about what makes Plytix the #1 easiest PIM by signing up for a free demo.